by Teddy Atlas
In the third round, Michael went out very cautiously. He fought only when he was being forced to fight. I was yelling at him, trying to wake him up. If you’re a gardener, you don’t wait until the weeds are killing your bushes, you start pulling them before they take root and start choking your garden to death.
“I want you to use that jab and I want you to work off it,” I barked at him when he came back to the corner. “But I don’t want you to be satisfied with it. You go in there and you start backing this guy up and doing what we trained to do. Otherwise don’t come back to this fucking corner! You hear me!”
As the fight progressed, the pattern continued, Michael coasting instead of hitting the gas. I’d get him to step it up for a while, but I was frustrated by my inability to get him to keep his foot to the floor.
I had told Michael in training camp that “you look at Holyfield’s body and it can be intimidating if you allow it to be because it’s so chiseled. But it’s actually a negative for him.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“He’s so streamlined and tight that there’s actually not much protection in his body.” Holyfield had gotten hurt by body punches when he fought Michael Dokes. The perception was that wasn’t the place to go. But the reality was that it was the place to go. I told Michael that, and whenever he landed a body punch in the fight, you could see Holyfield grimace. The problem was he wasn’t doing it enough. Every time I saw Michael stop working, I said to myself, “How can I get him to do more?”
Holyfield looked lethargic to me. He wasn’t the consistent offensive machine he usually was. But incredibly, at the end of the fifth round, Michael tapped him on the ass with his glove before they headed back to their corners. It made me crazy.
“What the fuck are you doing, tapping this guy on the ass?” I yelled at him. “He ain’t gonna let up on you because you do that. Don’t start looking for deals or begin lying to yourself.”
As the fight went on, Michael kept letting Holyfield hold on the inside, kept letting him rest, kept letting him use his experience to conserve energy for the later rounds. Even though I thought we were winning most of the rounds, I was upset. We were trying to take a special fighter’s title.
Sure enough, in the seventh round, Holyfield stepped it up. Even though Michael was still doing some good things, I got caught up in what he wasn’t doing. Holyfield was too seasoned and too smart a boxer. If we left him in a position to be able to steal the fight, he would. Especially because he was the champion and we were in Las Vegas.
The eighth round produced more of the same from Michael. I could see all the opportunities he was missing. I was scared, frankly. I thought we were blowing it. When the bell rang, ending the eighth round, I put Michael’s stool in the corner and climbed in the ring. As Michael walked toward me, I grabbed him and looked in his eyes.
“If you don’t want to fight this guy, I will!” I yelled. I needed to get through to him somehow, so I sat down on his stool. It was impulsive. It wasn’t premeditated or planned. Michael didn’t know what to do. He just stood there, looking at me.
“Do you want me to fight him?” I said. “Do you? Do you want me to change places with you?” I had his attention now. “Look, Michael, I’m not getting up until you tell me you want to win the title. Do you want to win the title?”
“Yes.”
“Then you gotta show it!” I got up from the stool and let him sit down. “Listen,” I said, “this guy is finished!” I squeezed a wet sponge on Michael’s head to cool him off. “He’s finished!” I was right up in his face. “Michael, there comes a time in a man’s life when he makes a decision to just live, to survive—or he wants to win. You’re doing just enough to keep him off ya and hope he leaves ya alone. You’re lyin’ to yourself, but you’re gonna cry tomorrow. You’re lyin’ to yourself!…And I’d be lyin’ if I let you get away with it! Do you want to cry tomorrow? Huh? Then don’t lie to yourself anymore! There’s something wrong with this guy! Now back him up and fight a full round!”
Over in Holyfield’s corner, he was being told things like “Trust in Jesus,” and “Relax,” and “Breathe deep.” If you could have cut around the arena, the contrasting scenes that were going on at that moment were really something. Down in their seats, Elaine and Nicole and little Teddy were sitting in front of this big gambler, Roger King of King World (the syndication company behind shows like Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy!, and The Oprah Winfrey Show), who had $200,000 riding on Michael. Elaine told me later that when King realized he was sitting behind her and my kids, he said, “That’s why I bet on this fight. Your husband. I didn’t bet on Moorer, I bet on him.” He wound up talking to them throughout the fight, and when I sat down on Michael’s stool, he said, “Now that’s different. I’ve never seen that before.” Meanwhile, Elaine was going, “Oh my God. He’s lost his mind.” And my nine-year-old son, little Teddy, was going, “It’s okay. Dad knows what he’s doing. He’s trying to get Michael to fight.” And on the HBO telecast, Jim Lampley was saying about me and Moorer, “I don’t know how long that marriage can last, but it’s an interesting one.”
Despite my attempts to rouse him, Michael didn’t pick up the pace in the ninth round. It was as if he refused to acknowledge to himself that the heavyweight title meant something. If he told himself it actually was important, he’d be too vulnerable if he lost. If he didn’t acknowledge the importance, then he couldn’t be hurt. That was why I told him that he was lying to himself. I knew it was going to hurt if he lost. I knew it. I felt that I couldn’t let up. At the same time there was a temptation to let up, there was this little voice in my head saying: “They’re not going to look at you, they’re going to look at him. They’re going to say, ‘You did all you could. You can’t fight for the guy. He’s a mutt. It’s not your fault.’” The impulse to hide behind that scared the shit out of me. If I did that, I was a co-conspirator—I was the real mutt.
So I kept pounding it into him. “I’m telling you, you’re blowing it, Michael. You’re blowing it! And you know what? You’re gonna cry afterward. You’re gonna cry! He’s gonna lose his next fight instead of this fight!”
Some people might think I was too hard on him. But I knew it was all there for us. Holyfield was less than a hundred percent. By not going full out, Michael was allowing him to survive. Holyfield was grabbing him, and clutching, and Michael was going along with it, he was making that silent contract with Holyfield, he was embracing it. If Michael had kept pressing him, he would have knocked Holyfield out. As much respect as I have for Holyfield, that’s the simple truth.
In the twelfth and final round, Michael continued to nail Holyfield with his jab and with the jab-uppercut we had worked on in training camp, but always just one punch at a time, landing then backing off, the way he’d done throughout the fight. When the bell sounded, my first thought was, Did we do enough? Everyone else in the corner was kissing him and hugging him, saying, “Hey, champ!” and congratulating him. The first thing I said to him was, “You could have done more.”
In those agonizing moments while we were all waiting for the decision, that’s what I kept thinking. You could have done more. What’s funny is that down at ringside, my son, little Teddy, was like an echo of me. He was telling Elaine, “I don’t know if he did enough.” A nine-year-old boy analyzing it as calmly as could be.
The longest moment in boxing is the one right after you hear the words “The winner and…,” and you’re waiting for the ring announcer to say either “new” or “still champion.” That’s an excruciating moment. At ringside, where my family was sitting, Roger King and this other gambler who had bet on Holyfield were arguing over who they thought had won. My daughter was so nervous she was shaking, but my son was very serene. He was listening to these two gamblers argue. King was going “And new!” and the other guy was going “And still!,” and that’s all my son could hear, “and new” and “and still” back and forth. So when Michael Buffer said, “The winner and new…,”
Teddy turned back to the Holyfield bettor and said, “And new!” and that was it. Everybody started going crazy, hugging each other, jumping up and down. That’s all I was waiting for, that word. But if you watch the tape of the fight, you’ll see that while Michael was hugging Davimos and the Duvas and their partner Bill Kozerski, I was off by myself to one side, lost in my thoughts. Meanwhile, Jim Lampley, on TV, was saying, “What is Teddy Atlas thinking right now? Look at him, he’s the only one not sharing in the celebration.”
Amid the pandemonium—the crush of the TV crew, the cornermen, the security people, and the fans—I was thinking about my father. During the twelfth round, I had looked up—and I had never done this before—I had looked up and crossed myself. I had said, “Listen, Dad, please help us. This is what I wanted to give you. All those years I lived in Catskill, this is why.”
In the midst of the bedlam, I thanked him. I said, “Thanks, Dad,” and it was as if I had finally buried him, as if he hadn’t really been buried until that moment. I said, “It turned out okay, didn’t it?” Then I thought, I gotta get my kids in the ring. You see, my dad had looked out for me and given me this gift, now I needed to look out for them. I knew they wanted to come in the ring. When they were real little they had asked me, “Dad, when you win the heavyweight championship of the world, can we come in the ring?,” and I had said, “Yeah, of course.” So that was what I was thinking about. I’d never forgotten them asking.
Henry Gluck, the CEO of Caesars, made his way over to me and said, “Congratulations, Teddy.” I responded, “Yeah, thank you. Listen, can I get my kids into the ring? I gotta get them in here.” It wasn’t easy with all the people and the security jammed in there. Gluck turned to one of the security guys and said, “Get Teddy Atlas’s kids in this ring right now.”
The security guys located my kids and started passing them up, handing them up into the ring. Nicole was crying. Little Teddy’s eyes were red. “You did it, Dad!”
“No, we did it,” I said, taking them both into my arms, hugging them to me tight.
THE DAY AFTER THE FIGHT, DOWN IN THE CASINO LOBBY, just before leaving for the airport, I was with Mark Kriegel, who had been filing stories on me and Michael for the Daily News and knew about the omens and odd coincidences leading up to the championship. He followed along with me when I went to the sports book to cash my winning bet on Michael.
“What the hell, Teddy?”
“You didn’t know I made a bet on him?” The guy behind the counter ran my ticket through the computer, then handed me two packets of five thousand dollars apiece. I put the money in my gym bag. “I’m telling you,” I said to Kriegel, “it was destiny. I knew we couldn’t lose. Here, wait a minute.” We were walking past the high-limit slot machines. I went over to the lady cashier and handed her a hundred-dollar bill. “I need a hundred-dollar coin,” I said.
“Ah, you’re gettin’ cocky now after you won,” Kriegel said.
“No, I’m tellin’ you, it was fate. It was my father. Until I leave here, I can’t lose. That’s just how it is.”
I went over to a slot machine and put the hundred-dollar coin in. Kriegel was the kind of guy who wouldn’t bet two dollars on the sun coming up in the morning. Gambling made him very nervous. “You’re a sick man,” he said.
“You don’t understand,” I said.
I pushed the button and the wheels rolled. Bop, bop, bop, bop…. Ding, ding, ding! Just like that, two thousand dollars in silver coins dropped into the tray! Kriegel’s eyes bugged out of his head.
“That’s crazy,” he said.
“If I didn’t have to leave this place, I’d never lose.” We had to get to the airport to catch our plane. Elaine and the kids were waiting for me.
Kriegel was shaking his head. “I gotta do something about this,” he said, and started to take off.
“What? Where ya goin’?” I said.
He looked back over his shoulder. “I gotta see if I can get ahold of my editor, see if it’s past deadline.”
“What?”
“That story I filed today?” he said. “How can I not try and put this in?” And with that he took off, sprinting across the endless carpet.
PART OF THE PLEASURE OF WINNING THE TITLE WAS KNOWING that other people were with me, rooting for me, and that it genuinely meant something to them. That made me feel good. You usually don’t think of those things, but for me that was a really unexpected and meaningful part of the whole experience. My old friend and guardian, Brother Tim McDonald, called to congratulate me afterward. He was living in Vancouver now, running a skid-row soup kitchen called The Door Is Open. When he found out they were showing the fight locally on closed circuit and charging seventeen dollars Canadian, he scrounged up enough money to go see the fight. This was a guy who barely had a red cent to his name because he always gave everything away. If I’d have known he wanted to see the fight, I would have flown him to Vegas. But I hadn’t known.
The only place showing the fight in Vancouver was a topless bar in the red-light district. For obvious reasons, Brother Tim didn’t want to be seen in a place like that, so he took this wool cap he always had and pulled it down real low, almost over his eyes, and ducked into this topless bar as inconspicuously as he could. It was easy to picture him, because I remembered that blue wool watch cap from when we’d taken our walks around the streets of Greenwich Village all those years earlier.
Once inside the strip club, he had to move up close to the bar because he was hard of hearing and needed to be close to the TV. Naked girls were twirling on a pole near him, and even the bartender was scantily clad. She approached him and asked him what he wanted to drink.
“Nothing,” he said, averting his eyes.
“There’s a two-drink minimum.”
“All right. Two Cokes.”
When the fight came on, Brother Tim tried to keep a low profile, but whenever something exciting would happen, his emotions would get away from him and he’d stand up and cheer. In between rounds, instead of breaking for commercials (because it was pay-per-view), the cable network showed the corner action. They’d cut from Holyfield’s trainer talking about faith and trusting in Jesus to me saying to Michael, “…otherwise don’t come back to this motherfucking corner.” This went on round after round. Finally before the last round, Holyfield’s corner was again going, “God is with you,” and Brother Tim couldn’t contain himself anymore. He jumped out of his seat and yelled, “No, he’s not! He’s on the other guy’s side!” Of course, as soon as he said it, he remembered himself and pulled his head down, muttering, “Sorry. Sorry.”
MICHAEL AND JOHN DAVIMOS CAME TO NEW YORK AND visited me a few days after the fight. Elaine made Michael chicken the way he always liked with plenty of garlic. Everyone was in great spirits. After lunch, Michael grabbed a basketball and said, “Let’s go to the park.” The way they were all smiling, I should have known something was up. But I went along with them, down the elevator and across the street toward the park. Suddenly, Michael said, “Hey, that’s a cool car!” And we all turned and there was this beautiful, shiny red Lexus sports car parked at the curb. Michael walked over toward it, going, “Wow, I wonder whose car this is. This is a bad ride!”
Michael was such a car freak, it wasn’t out of character for him to act like that. But then everyone else walked over to take a closer look. Elaine. Her sister. The kids. Davimos. Now that I think back on it, it’s obvious that it was all planned out. Anyway, I noticed that there was a dealer’s sticker on the side window. When I took a closer look I saw my name was on it. I looked up and everyone was grinning. Michael held out the keys for me and said, “Thank you.”
Meanwhile, all these people and kids from the park saw what was going on and came over, and they all became part of the moment, congratulating me and Michael, shaking our hands, slapping us on our backs. “The world champs!” One of our neighbors from across the park came over and said to me and Elaine, “We’re going to be sorry to see you guys leave.” She just
made the assumption that would happen, even though we didn’t move for another year or two.
“C’mon, Teddy,” Michael said. “Let’s take your new wheels for a spin.”
The two of us got in the car. It had that new leather smell. Everything was pristine and spanking new. I turned the key. The engine hummed to life. With everyone smiling, applauding, and waving, I drove slowly down the block.
I drove a couple of blocks, not really knowing where to go, and then we were passing by my friend Anthony Spero’s place, and I thought, Anthony would get a kick out of this. I pulled over and jumped out, leaving the car running at the curb. Anthony was a good friend of mine, a boxing fan, who at that time was under house arrest for alleged mob-related activities and was wearing a bracelet. (He’s currently serving a life sentence in Florida, which, in my opinion, is a travesty; I think the government set him up and I hope someday it’ll be rectified and he’ll get to come home. I’m not saying he’s a perfect individual, but in my eyes he’s a good man and a good friend.)
When he saw me coming up the walk, Anthony and his girlfriend, Louise, came out of the house. He couldn’t go too far because of the bracelet, but he came a little ways and gave me a hug. Then Michael got out of the car, and I introduced them, and Michael went, “Hey, Anthony, what do you think of Teddy’s ride?”
“What?” Anthony said.
“What do you think of my man’s ride?”
At that point Anthony understood, and he said, “It’s beautiful.” Then he said to Michael, “You fought good. You’re a good fighter.” But he didn’t leave it there. “You could be champion for a long time,” he said. “You’ve got a beautiful jab. You just gotta be more aggressive with it. You should have knocked that Holyfield out.”